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Issue an order protecting religious employers

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, chapter 18, p. 586. Written by Jonathan Berry.

Issue an order protecting religious employers

The document says “should”Who acts: PresidentHow: executive orderp. 586 in the PDF
What the document says

“The President should make clear via executive order that religious employers are free to run their businesses according to their religious beliefs”

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 586

The chapter says this should hold notwithstanding general nondiscrimination laws, and that the order should support the participation of religious employers and employees as federal contractors and in federal programs. It separately asks Congress to make Title VII's religious organization exemptions more explicit.

What the document actually says

“The President should make clear via executive order that religious employers are free to run their businesses according to their religious beliefs”

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 586
That sentence, in plain words

Sign an order. It would say bosses may run a firm by their faith.

What this is about

Some bosses run a firm on faith lines. The book says an order should protect that. It would hold even against some equal rights rules.

Read against the documents indexed here on August 26, 2026, and nothing was found that answers this. Executive Order 14291 of May 1, 2025 sets an executive branch policy of vigorously enforcing existing religious liberty protections and establishes a Religious Liberty Commission, whose report is to consider the First Amendment rights of employers and employees among many other topics, and which terminates on July 4, 2026 unless extended. The commission reports and advises. The order declares nothing about whether religious employers may run their businesses according to their beliefs notwithstanding general nondiscrimination laws, and it says nothing about religious employers as federal contractors or in federal programs. That is a record of a search, not a finding that nothing has happened: an act this site does not hold, or one that answers the proposal in words unlike its own, would not be caught by it.

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How to cite this
  1. The document itself

    Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves (The Heritage Foundation, 2023), p. 586.
    https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

  2. This page

    “Issue an order protecting religious employers,” Project 2025, chapter 18, p. 586. Read the Mandate, https://readthemandate.org/project-2025/proposal/ch18-religious-employer-order/ (retrieved October 7, 2026).

Cite the document when the claim is about what the document says. Cite this page when the indexing, the wording or the record of what has happened is what is being relied on.

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The quotation is the document's own words, exactly as printed, checked against the page number against the book itself before publishing. The paragraph underneath is our summary, not the document's words. So is the plain English version, which is why it sits beside the quotation rather than replacing it.

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